On Monday, the band released its final, posthumous album,
“Ultimate In Luxury,” which you can
stream here. Sylvester and Moerder are both friends, so I
reached out to do a little postmortem for Mr. Dream and the handful
of scorched-earth punk records they left behind.

So tell me about the birth of Mr. Dream. You two have
known each other since college, right? What led to starting the
band?

Nick Sylvester: Five years ago I would have said something like
“pure and utter disgust for chillwave.” The truth is more banal. I
knew Adam from the Lampoon, and I knew Matt through a mutual friend
named Win Ruml. The three of us were all looking to make music at
around the same time in 2008. We went to a Jay Reatard show
together at Europa and knew that was the kind of music we needed to
be making: something loud and fast and stripped down. It looked
like a lot of fun to play that kind of music.

I would describe Mr. Dream’s music as sort of
hyperkinetic lit-punk, or like, the sound of pissed-off New Yorkers
playing music that sounds like F-18s. Please improve on this
description.

NS: That was always the blessing and the curse of this band.
People heard we went to Harvard or wrote for Pitchfork and assumed
the music was much more deliberate than it actually was. I don’t
recall any literary references in any of our songs.

AM: I like to think that Mr. Dream’s sound predicted the
pummeling rage and anguish one finds on Twitter.com every
day.

Though I’d read your music writing before I’d met you,
this is the first band I know of that you two were in. How long
have you guys been playing?

NS: I played trumpet in a wedding band called the Stu Weitz
Orchestra. We had one or two gigs every weekend around Philly. I
also played trumpet in the Matt Turowski Jazz Explosion. This is
how I paid for high school. In college, I was in a band called
Forced Premise with a bunch of Lampoon people: Simon Rich, Rob
Dubbin, Colin Jost, and sometimes our friend Matt LeMay. He was an
honorary member.

Adam Moerder: I was in a grunge band in high school, but we
never made it further than the high school talent show circuit. The
band was called Scorched Earth and we had a rule to always perform
in our pajamas.

NS: This is the first time I’m hearing about the pajamas.

How’d the band go about writing songs?

NS: We all tried to bring in rough ideas, but it was usually
Adam who brought in the strongest ones and stitched the songs
together. I learned so much about songwriting from him. He might be
my favorite rock songwriter—which made producing these records so
difficult and emotionally complicated. I didn’t know what I was
doing, and I didn’t want to fuck anything up. Our first EP was the
first time I ever recorded or mixed anything and I made all kinds
of stupid mistakes. So the kind of sound we were looking for
changed as I learned new tricks and got better at listening. There
aren’t many bands I know of whose production gets better with each
successive record—certainly not in such a pronounced and obvious
way.

Why’d you guys decide to end the band?

AM: There was this big swath of music we loved that wouldn’t
have worked in the context of Mr. Dream. We wanted to branch out,
but felt restricted by how a Mr. Dream song was “supposed to
sound.” Plus we were gradually becoming not terrible at our
instruments, which opened up a lot of possibilities.

Nick, how did the evolution of your record label,
Godmode,
coincide with the lifespan of Mr. Dream?

NS: Godmode was a vanity label for Mr. Dream releases. In 2011,
I started doing more production work outside the band, and one of
the acts I worked with was YVETTE. We did a 7” together (Matt LeMay
co-produced), and not a single label we approached would put it
out. I couldn’t believe it. I had just assumed all great bands find
a home somewhere eventually. Not the case. I decided to make
Godmode more of a real thing and put out the record.

AM: I don’t have an official title on the label (other than
Montreal Sex Machine and FITNESS member), but I generally try to
pitch in whenever possible, whether that’s listening to drafts of
songs, loading in gear for a show, or buying some Red Bulls for
Nick because he says it’s very important for the label that he has
Red Bulls.

NS: We can work on an official title.

AM: “Riff technician.”

So why does Godmode release its music on
cassettes?

NS: The process for making the music isn’t different, but the
mindset is. I wrote about this for Pitchfork last year, you can
read that
here:

But there’s no format more human than the cassette. No
format wears our stain better. I have not encountered a technology
for recorded music whose physics are better suited for fostering
the kind of deep and personal relationships people can have to
music, and with each other through music. … No audio format keeps
me more focused on listening to the thing itself, without the
distraction of having a web browser right in front of me, without
the baggage of an ersatz music news cycle, the context upon
context, the games of the industry. Music released on cassettes
doesn’t feel desperate or needy or Possibly Important. It tends not
to be concerned about The Conversation. It resists other people’s
meaning. That’s what I like about the cassette. It whittles down
our interactions with music to something bare and essential: Two
people, sometimes more, trying to feel slightly less
alone.

One of my favorite touches about Godmode are the essays
that you guys include with the cassettes, which are like abstract
liner-notes. How’d that become a thing, and what do you guys like
about it?

NS: I started doing this when I found out other tape labels were
copying our style guide—right down to the type and stamp. It’s not
exactly an original idea to use stamps—I ripped off Jon Galkin at
DFA—but after I found out about this, I wanted to do something
nobody else could replicate. The cover essays are a way to vibe a
release and give the songs an emotional context.

AM: The packaging was a stroke of genius from Nick. The essays
are my favorite, they really set the tone for each release. As a
kid I remember being so excited to buy No Code, the Pearl
Jam album, because the CD packaging included all these random
polaroid pictures (one was an extreme close-up of Dennis Rodman’s
eyeball). What does it all mean?! It created such a cool
aura of mystery. While nothing on Godmode will ever measure up to
the divine perfection of Pearl Jam, we’re at least standing on the
shoulders of giants.

The Godmode family now includes Mr. Dream
kindred-spirits Sleepies as well as artists completely different
from your band, and each other, like Yvette, Fasano, and Shamir.
What’s the pattern usually like of an artist ending up on
Godmode?

NS: I’m trying to put together a good cocktail party. For me,
that means playing personalities off one another. You end up
approaching something like Shamir’s music in a very different way
when it’s on a label with Yvette. The only hard rule for our crew
is no assholes. I work with every artist really closely so I have
to want to actually spend time with you.

Nick, what kind of trajectory do you see Godmode taking?
How are you looking to expand and continue the label?

NS: It’s a new operation so there’s not much of a plan beyond
doing more of what interests us and less of what doesn’t. I enjoy
every aspect of Godmode. Everything from how we reply to press
inquiries to how we do our distribution to how we do our books is
an opportunity to do something special. As a producer I’m lucky: I
get to choose what I want to work on, and feel as invested in the
music as the artists do.

Adam, what are you interested in these days,
making-music-wise? I feel like I read somewhere that you were sort
of over, or frustrated with, guitars?

AM: Oh, I still love guitars, but I felt uncomfortable being
pegged as a “rawk” guy. It’s like that Seinfeld episode where
Jerry’s afraid to have a threesome and forever be known as an orgy
guy…that lifestyle becomes you.

Enter MSM and FITNESS. With the former, Nick and I really
wanted to capture a rock band attempting to make dance music and
the rickety mess that ensues. It keeps getting compared to LCD
Soundsystem, which is fair, but the inspiration mostly came from
those Rolling Stones records where they tried to do disco.

FITNESS is mostly the result of me learning how to use
synthesizers and drum machines. It’s a totally different writing
process than anything else I’ve worked on, which is really
refreshening. Basically the project was born when I first laid eyes
on this
album cover.

I remember you tweeted something about a Pitchfork
interview with the band Posse and how it was cool that musicians
were talking about their day-jobs now. You have a day job; Adam and
I worked together at BuzzFeed right before I left, while Nick has
done a bunch of interesting stuff outside of music. What has it
been like balancing music with working, writing,
etc.?

NS: I don’t think anybody deserves to make a living from music.
If it happens, that’s great. But you can’t expect people to like
what you do, let alone pay for it.